I just got back from an excellent trip out to see family and i was lucky enough to have a clear sky
for the peak of the Perseid meteor shower and was able to capture dozens of meteors on camera
so for this five minute friday i wanted to show you how to identify meteors because if you're
new to capturing them it's easy to mix them up with satellites or planes or other stuff
up in the night sky after we go identify the photos with meteors in them i'll do a quick
overview on how i make a stacked composite image with several meteors combined into one photo
my capture technique for the night was very simple i just set up a DSLR and a fast 24 millimeter lens
in this case the Rokinon on a tripod and then i just jammed uh i set the camera to iso 3200 eight
second exposures and continuous shooting mode and then i just jammed this little release into the
hold position so that it would keep taking photos one after the other because the trick with meteors
is you don't want to miss any so this is a good way to do it if you have an intervalometer just
set it so that it's taking pictures continuously with as little gap as possible
i aimed the camera at the constellation Perseus that's the constellation that the Perseid meteor
shower is named after so you can certainly review your photos you know right on the DSLR screen and
i often do but i find when i really want to find all the meteors that i've captured it's easier to
review the photos on the computer with a bigger screen and there are many different applications
for image review there's lightroom there's blink and pix insight or even just the built-in finder
on mac or file explorer on windows would work too but i'm going to show you my preferred software
for this task which is adobe bridge and this is an application designed solely for reviewing images
and organizing them so i have adobe bridge open here and i'm just going to use the right and left
arrow keys to move through my pictures and what i'm looking for are streaks of light
and i don't know if you can see this in the video but i can already see some streaks of light
going through the pictures here but i already know that these streaks are satellites let me show you
how i know that see how there's a streak there and then if i jump to the very next frame that streak
continues along the same path that means that that uh object was flying across the sky for
more than eight seconds um so it's it's definitely a satellite because a meteor just
goes by like that like it's a flash like under a second while a satellite moves a lot slower
so if you see the same object moving along a path in multiple frames you know that
it's not a meteor but a satellite or a plane and here we have something more interesting see how
i in the picture right before nothing then there's a streak right there going down
and then if i go to the next picture it's gone so it's only in one picture so that's
a good sign it might be a meteor let's now zoom in and look at it
and here's another good sign it is brighter and then it gets dimmer so this isn't always true but
that's a good sign of a meteor um sometimes with usually with satellites they're more consistently
just a line and so i'm pretty sure that's a meteor so what i'm going to do is just going
to right click and choose five stars and then i can come back once i've marked all
the shots that i think have meteors and just limit this to just the shots i've identified
with meteors in them so let's keep going here okay this looks like an interesting object it
looks nice and bright it has some color to it maybe that's a meteor now if i zoom in see how
there are three distinct lines uh like that that actually indicates that's a plane because
uh it's like the the lights on the wings and then uh and then a headlight um so that's actually
a plane going through my frame and then i can confirm it should continue on and yes it does
okay so here's an interesting one see that right there let's check it out okay and the colors are
a little bit wonky in these photos because i was using a modified camera but this is another um
good way to tell if something is a meteor if it has this sort of greenish cast to the whole
thing or to part of it um they often sort of look like that uh where they especially in the tail
of the meteor you'll see a bit of green okay i've now jumped ahead and i've gone through
all the pictures that i took that night and i want to show you how i can now limited in adobe
bridge to just the pictures that i've marked five stars meaning with meteors you go up here
to filter items by rating and you just click show five stars and there we go and so now i have all
of the ones that i've marked as having potential meteors and i can review them and also like i said
earlier i can now make a composite image with multiple pictures so let's open some of these
up into photoshop and i'll show you how i'm going to composite them together so i took all of those
pictures that we identified that had meteors in them and registered them all to one picture so the
stars would all match up then i'm going to go here in photoshop to file scripts load files into stack
and i've already aligned them in pix insight so i'm not going to align them here okay then
they're all in here and i took the image that i registered all of the other images
to and put it on the bottom and i'm going to use this as my base image because this
is the one that i want to use the foreground i like how the clouds look and the lake here
then i'm going to have take all of the images all these layers above that image
and click on the first one and then click on the last one to select them all
and change all of their blending modes to lighten okay and we get this sort of crazy look because
we have all the foregrounds in here as well as all of the meteors as you can see up here so what i'm
going to do next is with these all still selected i'm going to hit command g or that'll be ctrl g on
windows to group them so you can see they're now in a group i'll just call this meteors
and i'm going to add a layer mask to that group you can see now we have the layer mask there
okay then what i'm going to do is i'm going to go around on the image here and
draw in black or paint in black rather with the brush tool over each meteor so that it disappears
and there there is a method to this madness so just uh bear with me here while we do this
and a good way to do this is uh they're pretty straight all these different meteors so you can
click and then uh shift-click to to draw right on the meteor and you just want to you just want to
get the the meteor itself and nothing else i'm going to click shift-click get that meteor gone
okay so i've drawn in black on all of the meteors you can see the layer mask looks like that now
and then i'm just going to invert this layer mask by pressing command i on mac or maybe
ctrl i on windows and what we're left with is just the the meteors because that's what's
painted in white and everything else is black so we've now added the meteors to this base layer
and that's it that's the whole process for doing a meteor uh composite image now uh
i probably need to delete this one too down here now that i'm looking at it because a
meteor shouldn't be above the cloud layer like that so i'll just go back into my layer mask here
and paint that one out in black but the rest i can i can keep in and it looks pretty cool i think so
hope you enjoyed this uh till next time this has been Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com clear skies